The Sixth Family (30 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
“Descend and maintain flight level three-nine-zero,” an air traffic controller radioed to Learjet N100TA at 11:31 a.m., instructing the pilot to lower its altitude from Flight Level 410 to Flight Level 390.
“Three-nine-zero, One-Hundred Tango Alpha,” Day responded calmly. The Learjet, however, did not immediately start its descent. A minute and a half later, Day came over the radio again.
“One-Hundred Tango Alpha’s descending now,” she said. Her voice sounded hurried and the controller could hear a warning horn sounding in the background. Day made another brief transmission, which was unintelligible.
“Say again,” the controller directed. There was no response. Not even static.
At noon, the crew of a fishing boat spotted a huge water geyser on the surface of the Atlantic, 12 miles southeast of Savannah, Georgia. The captain sped to the scene and found debris scattered across the surface—bits of skin from the fuselage and pieces of the Learjet’s interior—but no survivors.
Ninety minutes after the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board was notified. That same day, a team of three investigators was dispatched from Washington, DC. On May 13, a search team, using sonar equipment, began an underwater scan of the crash site. Visibility underwater was poor and it was not until late in the afternoon the next day that the main wreckage was found, 55 feet below the surface, scattered over 75 feet of the ocean floor. Morton’s body and those of the two passengers were recovered from the wreckage. All had suffered multiple traumatic injuries. Day’s body was never found. After examining the debris, the NTSB was unable to determine the cause of the crash. The weather was almost ideal for flying—another pilot said he had encountered no difficulties in the area at about the same time. An explosion was eliminated as a possible cause, as was an onboard fire. The pilot and co-pilot were both certified; the jet had been well maintained.
“The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause for the accident was an uncontrolled descent from cruise altitude for undetermined reasons from which a recovery was not, or could not be, effected,” the official Aircraft Accident Report concluded.
Although the NTSB investigation could not solve the mystery of why the Learjet plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, it did resolve a longstanding mystery for the FBI. One of the passengers aboard N100TA was Salvatore Ruggiero. Until his body was identified in a morgue, Ruggiero had been listed as a fugitive from justice, a member of the Gambino Family, a large-scale heroin trafficker and a key customer of the Sixth Family. A year and a day earlier, Salvatore’s brother, Angelo, also a Gambino soldier and a childhood friend of John Gotti’s, had helped Gerlando Sciascia and Joe Massino get rid of the bodies of the three captains killed in the Bonanno purge.
Ruggiero’s flight from justice and his untimely death would mean far more to the Sixth Family than just the loss of a good customer. The search for Ruggiero—and the probe following his death—would bring grief to their American operations.
NEW YORK, EARLY 1980sThe Montreal-to-New York heroin pipeline was pouring product into the United States at such a rate that the supply outstripped any reasonable marketplace demand. Two years after the Bono wedding and a year after the murders of the three captains, the drug supply routes into the major cities of America were running almost flawlessly. The notion that organized crime merely supplies an existing need was put to the lie by the sheer bulk of the heroin shipments. A market had to be created, so the price of heroin was dropped considerably and the victim pool shot up accordingly, tenfold by most estimates. When it comes to street drugs, supply creates its own demand. In New York, the Sixth Family and other Sicilian-backed heroin enterprises were giving drugs on credit to Mafia soldiers and associates who were willing to take it and move it.
“There was no demand for a down payment,” a former undercover drug agent remembers. “It was: take it, take it, take it. Just take the fucking stuff. Move it. Pay when you can, just take it off my hands, I got more coming.”
Gerlando Sciascia certainly did not hint that his supply was running low. “How about 30 kilos?” he announced at the start of one of his ubiquitous sales calls, this one made to the home of a fellow mobster, whose children were playing in the same room.
“I got 30 things … that’s why I’m here.” Take it, take it, take it.
The 10 years from 1975 to 1985 were the golden years of heroin—even more so than during the decades of the French Connection, whose routes seem unsophisticated by these standards. The loads were larger, the market far wider and the facilities for repatriating the dirty money sleeker and more global. The expatriate Mafia families—the Rizzutos, the Caruana-Cuntreras and the Bonos, among others—came to true power in these heroin years, just as the old gangs of the Prohibition-era were built on their ability to move alcohol.
No one could afford not to be in the game: the Sicilian clans and the American Mafia families all recognized the vast profits at hand and had members work their way into the heroin trade just to maintain the status quo in the underworld, if nothing else. The Bonannos were out in front, but the Gambinos were close behind. Any question that selling drugs had been “banned under pain of death” by the senior members of the American Mafia had long since been abandoned, even by those few who actually tried to stick to that code. In Buffalo, for instance, the old Mafia boss Stefano Magaddino reaped huge profits from his soldiers’ drug deals while ordering them to sell dope only in the black neighborhoods. Vito Agueci, the Toronto-based brother of the Sicilian trafficker Alberto Agueci, who helped run a piece of the French Connection, was inducted into the Buffalo family by Magaddino on the strength of his contribution to the heroin trade.
No family was above it. It was a sport without spectators.
Sciascia was the Sixth Family’s lead player in the New York distribution, lining up customers, keeping an eye on their activities and continually working to ensure that the family’s interests were not overlooked. As a captain in the Bonanno Family, he carried weight beyond the kilos he was offering.
With Sciascia was Joe LoPresti, his direct Montreal liaison. Both were close friends and distant family of Vito Rizzuto, and among the inner circle of the Sixth Family. Around them in New York were dozens of well-connected salesmen who had their own networks of buyers along the eastern seaboard and farther afield in American cities. These Sixth Family constituents had been slowly increasing the organization’s output and efficiency in New York for at least three years since they first started to make their way onto police radar through street snitches and drug probes. The more business they generated, the more police started to hear of them. To keep the money flowing satisfactorily, however, they needed to boost their sales volume. And that required careful client management.
Sciascia was a consummate salesman. He was always ready with product, always prepared to cut a deal. And he looked after his buyers, wanted them for himself and often lied to them that they were his only customers.
“How’d you make out with George?” John Carneglia, a Gambino soldier, once asked his mob colleague Angelo Ruggiero, brother of the fugitive who died in the plane crash, after Angelo had met with Sciascia to arrange a drug deal.
“Very good,” Angelo replied. “Excellent. He doesn’t want to do anything with anyone else but us.” Both Ruggiero brothers had become well acquainted with Sciascia and LoPresti from their frequent sales calls. Salvatore Ruggiero was Sciascia’s first major client in the Gambino Family. Along with Gotti’s brother, Gene, the Ruggiero brothers formed an extensive drug-trafficking network within the Gambinos. Ostensibly, John Gotti himself was never involved in the drug trade, but with two of his closest friends and his own brother so tightly involved with Sciascia and LoPresti, it is impossible to believe that he did not know and approve of their activities, and profit from them. Like the other families, the Gambinos developed a heroin wing within their organization; it was often managed by the boss’s brother.
Unlike Angelo, Salvatore Ruggiero had graduated from street thuggery and become a multimillionaire, selling a range of drugs, from major shipments of marijuana to heroin and cocaine. Wanted on several charges, he had become a fugitive, hiding out with his wife, Stephanie, under various names in New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. His prime heroin supplier was Sciascia.
When the Gates Learjet carrying Salvatore plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in May 1982, Salvatore had been on the run for six years. Being a fugitive had not slowed his drug-dealing activities; at the time of his death, he had yet another shipment of heroin, taken on credit from Sciascia, stored in his house awaiting resale.
After Angelo was notified of his brother’s death, he, along with Gene Gotti and Carneglia, went to Salvatore’s hideout in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, searching for the heroin and hidden cash. A few months earlier, however, hoping to catch up with the elusive Salvatore and to gain evidence to indict John Gotti, the FBI’s Gambino Squad had thoroughly wired Angelo Ruggiero’s home in Cedarhurst, Long Island. Not only was his telephone line bugged, but microphones were placed in his kitchen, den and dining room. Federal agents recorded Angelo’s attorney, Michael Coiro, offering condolences to Angelo on the death of his brother, and then saying: “Gene found the heroin.”
The talk of heroin in the wake of Salvatore’s death—and the connection to a Gotti—seized the attention of investigating agents. The fishing expedition on Angelo suddenly held the promise of reeling in big fish. Targeting Angelo for electronic surveillance had been a perfect call for another reason. Often known as “Quack Quack”—because of his inability to stop talking—Angelo was a constant chatterbox, providing a running commentary on everything going on around him. Everyone who visited Angelo had to endure endless gossip, complaints and general indiscretions. It was ridiculously loose talk, doubly so because he knew he was under investigation. On one of Sciascia’s sales visits, he heard how Angelo had suspected he was being monitored and the steps he had taken to ensure he was not; all of it, meanwhile, recorded by the FBI. Angelo had answered the doorbell one day to find a workman from the telephone company outside.
“What the hell do you want?” was Angelo’s greeting.
“I come here to fix the phone,” the workman said.
“Come here to fix the phones?” Angelo bellowed. “You [were] fixing the phone before!”
“Me? Not me,” the confused workman said. “This is my area. Mister, I don’t know who those [other] people were.” Ruggiero called in a counter-surveillance expert, a retired detective, to check the entire house.
“It was clean,” Angelo told Sciascia. Too bad for Sciascia, LoPresti, Gene Gotti and any other gangster who stepped near Angelo’s house, that it was not quite true. Tipped off to the planned sweep, the FBI turned its bugs off the day of the scheduled search. With Angelo now relaxed in his supposed privacy, he again started to chatter wildly—and the bugs were turned back on.
Salvatore’s death hit Angelo hard. Afterward, he was often heard wistfully speaking of his brother to Sciascia and LoPresti.
“He made money,” Angelo said to Sciascia one day. “He knew how to make money.” In the mob, there were few more adoring words one could say about someone. Salvatore, clearly making money hand over fist through his connection to the Sixth Family, was a source of awe for Angelo, who tried his best to emulate him.
“He made me make money,” Angelo said. “I was in debt six months ago. I’m way out of debt now. I bet you—I’m no fucking millionaire, I got no million dollars—but I know what I got. And I gambled. Gambled. I mean I’m sitting on $400,000. What the fuck has my brother got? If I’m sitting on four, what does my brother got?” Such was the quick return on the Sixth Family’s merchandise. The day after the memorial service for Salvatore, a distraught Angelo worried that people who owed money to his brother would renege on their debt and deprive Salvatore’s children.
“We’re up against lice in this world,” Angelo said. “Listen, I ain’t no scumbag. I’m not asking nobody for nothing, you hear? All I’m telling you is this: If I find out anybody’s lying, a year from now, six months from now, and if anybody is holding back anything from my brother … I promise youse this, youse are gonna die the same way my brother died—in pieces. I give you my word on it. … My brother was good to everybody. My fucking brother helped every fucking one of youse.”
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